Children are suffering a severe deficit of play - <AUTHOR> http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/children-today-are-suffering-a-severe-deficit-of-play/ <comment><AUTHOR> Having grown up in the late 80s in an East Block country, this article resonated very strongly. Growing up in that place and time was akin to 50s America - no cable, consoles, arcades, VCRs or handhelds. We had TV, but it only had the single state broadcast channel which played only one cartoon.

The only thing to do was play which we did prodigiously - I was part of a large mix-aged group (6-12 kids, 5 years age difference) and we would play everything (sports, house, building things, demolishing things, raising stray animals, foraging fruit, fighting other kids). It was a great childhood and neither I nor my childhood friends (most of us are still friends, even across continents) would trade it for anything. Interestingly, it was almost the same childhood my mom and dad had.

My sister (the de-facto leader of our group) now has children and their childhood could not be any different - constantly shuttled from home to school to organized activity. Play only for a bit under heavily supervised conditions (ie, birthday party at another kids house) and filled to the brim with tablets, phones, computers etc.

I feel very bad for my nephew's effective lack of childhood, even more so because it seems that doing something differently is a big social taboo. My mom, siter and I have talked about this, and my sister described being almost powerless - who would they play with? Where? What are other parents going to think? etc etc.

When I go to places like rural Belize or small-town Costa Rica I see kids still playing and I wonder if that's not the best place to raise a small kid (4-10 years old).

<comment><USER3> I always find it interesting that nobody mentions this. Your generation, and the ones before you, destroyed and defunded parks, they built malls over open land, they made 100% safe unfun playgrounds, they turned America in the the most litigious country in the history of mankind scaring anyone from allowing anyone ever to make a mistake or get slightly hurt, you buy your kids more screens than books, and then at the end of the day you wonder aloud why kids don't play as much?

* That was a proverbial you, no you specifically OP.

<comment><USER4> Part of the problem is that the race for college has been pushed earlier and earlier as admissions has gotten more competitive.

Admission rates for colleges have been dropping across the board, for top tier schools even more sharply. When success in life in large part is still defined by one's undergraduate institution you can see why parents would focus on that at the expense of everything else.

I'm not a parent yet, and am not planning to be in the near future, but I've been thinking a lot about parenting now that I'm fully out of my childhood and it basically seems to come down to a bunch of tough compromises.

<comment><USER5> As a parent of an 8-year old, I don't think this is it at all. I think it's a couple things.

1\. Cutbacks of "scheduled creativity" time at school. This is a HUGE one. In the 70's, my school had an art class, music class, plenty of PE. Now, that's hugely, hugely cut. If I want my kid to do art? music? sports? (she wants to, after all). After-school scheduled activity time!

2\. 2 working parents. We're pretty free range, don't need to hover over playing kids, but we need to be within walking distance (at home down the street, or whatever). Juggling that "freely" as opposed to strictly-set activities? Much harder. Even if you get 1 afternoon free a week, there aren't other parents to trade off with.

3\. Basically, chicken-and-egg. If my kid doesn't have anyone to play with because they're all off at activities, better to have them doing these activities with their peers than sitting at home bored and idle (not that some down/idle time isn't good, but there can be too much).

Can't think of ANYONE in my peer group who's worried about college for their kids yet. Maybe in a couple years.

<comment><USER6> I think the 2 working parents in combination with commutes and non-walking friendly neighborhoods killed it.

<comment><USER7> YMMV. I went to school in mid 70's and both parents were working when I was in HS and before. As others have posted, I was unsupervised. Could ride a bike to/from school for 20-30 min etc. Not sure what all changed but the things I read now suggest its way different than when I started. I hesitate to say people seem younger but they do seem nastier and more self-focused. We had stoners and grinds and everything in between. I seem to recall sex. And the drug stories are legendary. Maybe the parents are trying to prevent their kids doing the same?

Which, of course, does wonders for the forbidden fruit aspect of things. Oh, and we had computers too. Big, slow things but they were there and just as fun to play with. But their relative rarity forced us to be social to a degree.

I'll go back inside so you can play on my yard now :-).

<comment><USER6> As I mentioned, it was two working parents _and_ the move to surburbia. (Well, I said non-walking-friendly neighborhoods, and didn't elaborate). This was what changed.

These suburbs, often designed after 1950s, were designed for car travel, rather than walking or biking. Many suburbs are designed with streets as fractals, often without sidewalks. It might be a "safe" subdivision, but there was a real risk in being run over by cars. Kids living in suburbia had to be driven everywhere for activities.

It's no coincidence that the kids growing up in that environment and coming into adulthood have increasingly moved to gentrified neighborhoods (the ones designed for walking). There has been a decline in buying cars. Whether that means allowing the kids to have free play remains to be seen. (But I suspect, things like the popularity of the books, _The Dangerous Book for Boys_ , _The Daring Book for Girls_ are indicative).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So are parents.

I'm not complaining for myself, because incomes among programmers give us much better options than most people, but I really feel sorry for people in the middle class. Two parents working to make ends meet doesn't leave a lot of time/energy for them to play either by themselves or with their children. That's part of why kids get dumped into organized but relatively low-value activities; it's the only way the parents get a break between waking and kids' bedtimes. Unfortunately, it's not good for _any_ of them, or for society as a whole.

<comment><USER9> True, but what puzzles me is that few people seem to object to that state of affairs. Maybe it is just that TV is that good at soothing emotions, or people are already used to being worker drones from their childhood?

<comment><USER10> "Temporarily embarrassed millionaires" syndrome?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having grown up in the 90s and 00s, I disagree. I had _tons_ of time to play, and you know what I did with it? I played. Outside at first, then video games, and I _still_ play now and then when I find time.

I've got a 13 yr old brother and a 10 yr old sister, and they play. Anecdotally, this article is bunk. Kids play still, even if they are getting shuttled off to various practices.

As a counterpoint to the rise in mental illnesses in children, isn't our improved ability to test for illness, and our increased willingness to diagnose mental disorders as much at play as any other cause?

In the 5 or so minutes it took me to read this article, I can't help but think of this as yet another example of, "my childhood was great, the next generation lost something!" that can be seen _throughout_ history. I'm no expert, and I know nothing more than a layman does on the topic, but in my limited experiences, I've found no such suggested problem.

I guess I just want my experience to be added to the data pile.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes, it's only an anecdote, one of these which this kind of article provokes; nevertheless it summarizes the content nicely.

I was giving guitar lessons some 20 years ago, among my students a well- mannered and friendly little, maybe seven years of age. Being a bit shy he did not tell much about himself, but he did not study much and I tried to find out if he was bored with me or the instrument.

"It's just, that I do not have so much time to study. I also have recorder lessons on Thursday and I get some extra private lessons because it's not going so well in school"

As he continued he revealed a stunning package of forced child labour extending into the weekend. Keyboard lessons, swimming, soccer (training and competitions), judo (also contests every second weekend). Not a single free minute.

Halfway the year he stopped. On the time of the guitar lessons his parents had scheduled regular counselling with a psychologist.

This happened 20 years ago (in the Netherlands). While we tried to find a kindergarten for our oldest sun two years ago, we learned that we could opt for mathematical and English training in some of them (we live in Portugal right now).

I understand that parenting also means: offering your child a future. For some this means: education, keeping them busy, making them competitive as early as possible. Not having done "the best" for your child: a nightmare, a failure! But often doing your best is: having trust, do nothing and let things grow. No need to hack your children.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's virtually impossible to correlate decrease in "play time" and increase in suicide rates apart from his anecdotal evidence.

Just because kids don't play the same way you did when you grew up doesn't necessarily mean they're doing it wrong.

Tomorrow there will be a study suggesting video games are a better intellectual stimuli for growing up and yield lower rates of accidental death in children.

<comment><USER14> A little bit more specifically, the exact failure mode is in properly identifying that mammals that are prevented from playing in multiple animal studies pretty much turn into complete F-ups when they become adults, and properly scientifically documents that human kids are prevented from playing more over the years while perhaps coincidentally mental illness levels have exploded in children.

So the specific failure mode is proving that totally F-ed up lower mammals equates to suicide in human teens. Probably the only really scientific conclusion you can gather is that forcing human kids (aka mammals) not to play screws them up horribly.

Well, I'd love to sit here and debate with my HN buddies but as you know the only hope for a middle class lifestyle is being in the top 5% so I gotta take off and helicopter my 2nd grade daughter from Violin lessons to Chinese lessons to Lacrosse League practice otherwise she'll never make it into Stanford.

Note I'm kidding, I don't even let my kids join organized sports, although we participate in totally dis-organized sports (aka, actually fun) at the park a couple times per week. My son's actually getting good at hitting a baseball, although no one keeps score.

<comment><USER15> why would you not allow your kids to play organized sports?

<comment><USER14> And I hate to reply twice but the other thing was organized sports = responsibility responsibility responsibility. Pay your dues. Buy your uniform. Responsible for getting your name and number on your uniform. Do your 10 hours of "volunteer" groundskeeping after the games. Which kid (aka parent) is responsible for the water bottles today, and which kid is bringing the snack this week. Make sure you show up at 5:47 on wednesday on the dot or we'll have to forfeit. You're responsible for 2nd base, I don't like being 2nd base, too bad you're responsible. You're responsible to wear the proper color sweatpants with your uniform shirt or whatever it was. All a bunch of totally non-fun BS. Nothing to do with play or fun.

In comparison, disorganized sports at the park is awesome, your only responsibility is not intentionally hurting another kid.

<comment><USER16> seriously?

organized sports were nothing like that for me during the late 80s / early 90s, nor are they like that now for my 7yo and 5yo boys. baseball is the same now (in california) as it was for me growing up on the east coast. soccer is a little different, but that seems more b/c of it's sheer popularity in these parts.

only difference i really note is that they're a little more strict about parents not helping out as assistant coaches unless they fill out a background check and attend a single training session for tips on coaching children of that age group. i don't object to either.

my boys love the sports they play.

note: they play at the recreational level, not competitive.

<comment><USER17> I grew up in the 90s.

Organized sports were mostly a fun thing until high school. In High School and above, sports became deadly serious (scholarship, scholarship, SCHOLARSHIP!!!), but before that it was almost simply playtime. I don't remember ever being stressed about Soccer or Track and Field.

Even in High School, Track and Field remained a "fun" sport for me (I can't fathom why anymore, but I remember enjoying running in the rain, and up/down stairs and everything). It was pretty much "stay at your own pace", since there were so many people at different skill levels.

I can imagine organized High School play to be stressful for a teenager, but I can't fathom being stressed about any sport before then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> look it's simple - there is a combination of fairly simple factors:

        l - parental distance (length)
        t - parental distance (time)
        F - Lord Of the Flies coefficient
        d - diversity of other children within reach

        TotalPositivePlay =   (l x t )
                              </comment><comment>--  raised to power of d
                                 F

in short, if a group of parents take their children to a park and can see them a hundred yards off for an hour, only have to intervene once to stop them bullying the snivelly kid, and almost every race, creed and class are represented in the kids - it will be a great day out.

So build for open or natural spaces, with good lines of sight and minimal killers like cars, allow parents the time to relax and realise its ok for Jimmy to run off for an hour because the shopping can wait, and then let them teach kids not to follow their instincts but actually respect others smaller and weaker then them, we might get over our fears.

yes we lean too much to DVDs and so on. but two weeks ago my kids and I painted cardboard dragons, picked blue series from a bush, ran off and hid in the woods, fell off swings and slides, made two meals and fought with foam swords. oh and I felt I just put them in front of the TV all the time.

lighten up FFS. Cars, commuting and the easy lure of the TV has hurt how we bring up children - but they also don't feel isolated, bored, or unprepared for a rapidly changing new world.

but yes, lets cut back on the organised activites and just to to the park more often.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sigh.

Without proper nutrition, they won't develop properly, to say nothing of being able to play. I know it's unrelated, but it seems like everybody wants to ignore the pink elephant in the room that American children aren't getting fed well enough. Plenty of research has shown malnutrition causes a host of issues in children that can affect them the rest of their life[4].

22 Million American children are on food stamps[1]. Keep in mind that 90% of those food stamps are redeemed by the third week of the month (the average meal per person comes out to about $1.50), and more than half of food bank customers (who come back at least 6 months out of the year) are food stamp recipients[2]. So families already can't afford to feed their kids on subsidies alone. On top of that, the cuts this November in SNAP will make that existing shortfall more drastic.[3]

I guess I just wanted to remind people that we're ignoring some bigger picture issues here, probably because they're difficult and uncomfortable. Sorry.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- fix/wp/2013/07/11/th...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- fix/wp/2013/07/11/the-fight-over-food-stamps-explained/) [2] [http://feedingamerica.org/how-we-fight-hunger/programs- and-s...](http://feedingamerica.org/how-we-fight-hunger/programs-and- services/public-assistance-programs/supplemental-nutrition-assistance- program/snap-myths-realities.aspx#) [3] [http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3899](http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3899) [4] [http://www.lsuagcenter.com/en/family_home/family/childcare/C...](http://www.lsuagcenter.com/en/family_home/family/childcare/Children_Childcare/Malnutrition+Impairs+US+Childrens+Health+Behavior+Says+LSU+AgCenter+Food+and+Nutrition+Expert.htm)

(my apologies to the international folks for having to read this rant; your children are probably better off than many of ours)

<comment><USER20> I don't think the author would have any objection to your points. But malnutrition is, to a large extent, an economic problem stemming from the fact that, in most Western countries, healthy foods are generally more expensive than unhealthy ones. The author is describing a problem that is largely cultural, and which requires an entirely different approach to solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Kids need some or all of the following things when growing up:

\- a creek or open stormwater drain to play in, be careful during rain \- a field big enough to experiment with golf in without killing someone \- a covert campground as a base to launch fire cracker attacks on the local youth group \- somewhere to do wheelies without being hit by a car \- abandoned stuff to explore, the older and dirtier the better \- a haunted looking house to be scared of (containing an elderly person who occasionally appears at the window) \- a beach, island or isthmus, to play Robinson Crusoe on \- some dirt to create a marble obstacle course in \- a hoop and stick to make running more useful \- a local cop who will make you do chores for trying to steal dinner from the local prawn farm \- cane fields to get lost in \- loose rules to a handful of sports \- a tall tree with branches overhanging a river to tie a rope swing to \- some kind of farm nearby where one can meet a horse, cow, goat or sheep

I'd also like to suggest a trampoline, but I'm keeping it out of the list because you have to buy it. It is imperative though for the early stages of learning to do somersaults in mid-air.

Thinking of all of these things from my childhood makes me somewhat lament the fact that I now live in a tiny apartment in Sydney and hardly ever leave the city.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not my children.

Thanks to parental controls, they have two hours of access to the flickering rectangle during week-end days, and 1 hour Mon-Fri. Even that seems like a lot. But anyway, that's it.

Once the OS kicks them out of the session, I "kick" them out of the house (metaphorically, but on a jocular/stern tone). Go and do some mischief outside.

<comment><USER23> Great, I'm sure they'll have a lot in common with their peers and a wide familiarity with their generation's culture when it comes time for them to interact with people whose lives you don't control.

As someone who also was forbidden to engage with popular culture (for vastly different reasons but essentially the same effects), I think it's great for children to grow up alienated and unable to connect with their peer group. This forces them to develop as individuals rather than as cogs in the machine of society.

<comment><USER24> A total allowance of 9 hours per week is hardly being forbidden to engage with popular culture.

<comment><USER23> It means they'll know one thing. They won't have time to get into anything else. Every day, they'll have to make the decision to play the one video game/watch the one TV show they know they'll like, or take a risk on something new. They'll choose the safe bet every time. This means they'll not be the Amish kids, they'll just be the kids that are really obnoxious about Power Rangers, talk about Power Rangers all the time, wear only Power Rangers clothes, but have never seen any other shows or played any other video games.

It's a great strategy if you're trying to breed risk-averse, close-minded social outcasts.

<comment><USER24> This is entirely contrary to my experience. My kids have slightly looser controls in the summer, tighter during the school year and it just doesn't work like that. My kids watch a range of stuff, have a range of friends, and all have skinned knees from playing outside _with their friends_ which seems not to be a trajectory of social outcasts. I will remind my daughter who currently has a shiner on her forehead from trying (and ultimately succeeding) to do a trick on her rip stick that she should be more risk averse. In my experience coaching, the kids with no media limits are either from poor families or are the real dullards of the group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I guess my kids didn't get the memo. They had an early release today from school today and are in the backyard building a teepee out of sticks with a friend and playing a game that apparently involves a lot of running and giggles (at least that is what I hear inside in my home office).

My oldest did ask if she could play Minecraft as soon as she got home but I told her no and that she should go build something real (I guess that is where the teepee idea came from).

</comment><comment><USER26> Wait. Does the author offer any evidence for these claims: "What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it."

Just "thinking about it" proves this?

<comment><USER27> You have to dress "get off my lawn" up a little, or else no one will pay you any attention. The irony of "think of the children not getting enough outside time" coming from these guys, self included, who spend too much time commenting on Hacker News won't escape the astute observer either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I always return to the question of: "Is the shorter amount of time for outdoor non-directed play _bad_ or just _different_ for my kids (compared to my childhood)?".

This read failed to convince me of the former. That being said, it did convince me to pick up the author's book.

<comment><USER29> Its a change; unprecedented in the history of mankind. So don't accept it blindly. Nothing about the makeup of humans prepared them for a childhood of over-supervised planned activities and a near-total lack of open-ended peer interaction.

Its a bigger risk to just blindly forge ahead with kids addicted to chat, sugar and the internet.

<comment><USER14> The Greek Spartan child rearing model, at least for boys? Historical documents would have mentioned if Spartan men turned out completely screwed up compared to Spartan women... probably. The ancients certainly enjoyed playing the compare and contrast game with the Athenians and it never seemed to come up in the numerous differences.

Also the model probably breaks down into its not terribly clear how oversupervised Spartan boys were. Its still probably a historical model worth considering.

<comment><USER30> I wonder if the militaristic upbringing served to remove the narcissism. An army requires a lot of cohesion and sacrifice. How well they were socially adapted, probably mattered less in a militaristic society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I played until the other kids stopped coming outside to play. Even then I still played a little, riding my scooter around the neighborhood. But after I ran out of friends where I lived (They either got sick, moved away, or decided they were too cool for me.) I got bored sitting by myself outside and started trolling the Internet or playing video games more.

Grew up in the 2000's.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a nice article. I think this longform format provides a lot more substantial and stimulating topics/content than any other online websites or digital magazines. This (Aeon) and Nautilus ([http://nautil.us](http://nautil.us)) are probably the only two online magazines that are worthwhile to read.

</comment><comment><USER33> Hell, I'm an adult and I suffer a severe deficit of play.

<comment><USER14> Hackerspace = adult playground.

<comment><USER34> a place where you get no exercise, are surrounded by testosterone, and get no Vitamin D doesn't sound like much of a playground :(

<comment><USER14> The closest one to me, which is still way too far away to actually join and use, is "famous" for inventing the idea of putting giant electric motors in kids car toys and then driving them around ridiculously fast until they break or hurt themselves. Bunch of people hanging out socially and mostly screwing around accomplishing nothing but having fun, sounds like "play". I suppose it depends a lot on which hacker space you hang out at, there probably are boring ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> There is this oft-repeated idea in modern culture: do what you love, and love what you do. But how do you find your passion? How does a person know what to aim for in life? I think it is the extra curricular activities that you do which determine if you'd find your passion. All the time that you spend in tinkering with stuff, reading books, playing games, hanging out with friends after school is the time you could find that. It is true that those passions change with age, but with any luck and a good teacher / parent) those passions could become your vocations. I remember the intial scene of the movie 'Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron' and realize that childhood is that time when we are free to experiment, unfettered by society's rules.

Schools teach us how to be disciplined and work hard, but a creative and a critical mind requires more to survive. It requires an atmosphere of similar kind of people, a place to keep on practicing its creativity.

</comment><comment><USER36> The classroom should be inverted. Each kid should get an ipad or some other tablet, with lessons delivered at home from a marketplace of "best courses" that the schools purchase. Every school day the school could have quizzes to tedt whether the student learned the previous day. If they missed some topics or nuances, they'd get it fixed later that day in smaller classes with more individual attention. If they got everything they can just go home and enjoy the day.

The motivation for kids to learn would be that they won't have to be stuck in school all day (and be accused of having ADD) and they won't miss out playing basketball wrh their friends if they learn everything the night before. It also makes them practice autonomy, self-direction and time management, and lessons by a really good teacher can be delivered to hundreds of thousands of kids instead of 30 -- with multimedia. In addition, kids would be able to paude it, grab lunch with friends, study with friends, etc. And yet they'd still practice being accountable but on a day-by-day basis so the price of "failure" is low.

School should be for social collaboration, remedial help, and practicing. That's where the tutors should be, not at home. Home should be a place of comfort and learning. The internet contains so much information, and by integrating lessons with tablet computers, kids get to develop modern habits of researching stuff online. They might even learn to manage the ADD that comes with being on a million sites at once. If they get restless they can go play basketball or explore and do something physical outside.

Such a school will not happen, sadly, because the goal of schools is to act as a daycare center to keep kids occupied most of the day -- while both parents work. This is what "a good economy" looks like?

This is the kind of school I'd like to send my kids to. Sadly the closest approximation right now is homescholing.

<comment><USER37> "a marketplace of "best courses" that the schools purchase"

The last thing we need is more attempts to shoehorn market-based approaches to education into our schools. Ignoring the matter of corruption among the school boards that would choose such courses (take a look at how textbooks are purchased for comparison) and the matter of politcally motivated interests that would undermine whatever market you manage to set up, we do not need the sort of close-to-the-margins, race-to-the-bottom, divide-and-conquer-the- customers approach that markets produce in other fields. Markets produce the kind of results that evolution produces -- sometimes beautiful things, sometimes disgusting things.

Higher education has already been undermined by market-based approaches. By focusing on what students are willing to buy, universities have lost sight of their academic mission. You see it in CS departments, where tough courses are watered down, where theoretical topics are pushed aside to make room for vocational training. You see it in humanities departments, assuming you can even locate them. You see it in the money spent trying to make schools look like suburban malls during a time when library hours are being curtailed to "save money."

I would also be wary of creating a monoculture, where the most popular curricula become universal and everyone comes out of school with the exact same way of thinking about the world. There is something to be said for encouraging some amount of diversity in our education system -- which is what happens when teachers develop their own curricula.

<comment><USER36> What's better, having courses delivered at home which are specifically created because of an incentive (money, wide distribution, etc.) with great production values, or having a huge proportion of the students be exposed to subpar courses delivered en masse in a classroom where everyone takes the same notes, and if they go to the bathroom or skip a class they miss something?

If there's a particular math lesson that was specially designed to teach kids in an awesome way, e.g. by an expert in teaching micro-steps one by one (and possibly be tailored to each kid through interactive features) ... why shouldn't more kids have it? Of course you should videotape it, and distribute it to as many kids as possible. And all this is possible, far more cheaply than paying an army of math teachers -- some worse than others -- to deliver "lectures" to kids sitting still 8 hours a day in class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I had that childhood in Appalachia in the 1980s, while still having a TV / VCR / Nintendo. During the day my mother would kick us all outside however, so I spent most of my time in the woods playing, or shooting hoops in the driveway, or playing wiffle ball and so on. Usually weekend nights were dedicated to video games, and daytime was for being outside.

Interestingly however, in the last 15 years apparently the area where I grew up has seen a substantial decline in participation by children in sports and other activities. What caused that? I can only think of three possibilities: 1) decline in parenting 2) obesity and or diet 3) cheap, plentiful digital gadgets (or a combination). Parents seem to be almost universally allowing their children to obsessively play with smart phones, tablets, etc. And many parents I know buy their kids big screen TV's for their rooms and video game consoles.

</comment><comment><USER39> I try to let my kids be as free range as possible. They don't watch any tv and organized play is kept to a minimum. I think it works pretty well, however any problems that come up are usually due to other people freaking out.

Either I get a lot of "you don't let your kids watch tv?!" type comments, or a random stranger will freak out because my kids are not tethered to me. I've had strangers stop while walking/riding their bike down my road and ask my daughters (the oldest is five) where they live while I'm working in the garden in the next yard over.

I honestly have no proof that raising kids like this is any better than letting them watch media or be in organized activities all the time. My reasoning is mostly based on how I was raised. I loved it and feel like I turned out reasonably well.

<comment><USER40> I love the free-range kids movement, and if I have kids I'll join it,

but I really don't understand the no-TV thing. When I was a kid I filled my room with televisions and computer monitors, and I watched two tv shows while I listened to top 40 radio while I alternated between playing Mario Bros and writing Pascal programs. It was the magic formula for helping me think clearly.

As an adult, I live in a no-TV house and I work in a quiet room on a single laptop, and I can never concentrate as well as I did back then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> My daughter was at a Democratic school in Israel last year, and things did not work out for us quite well for us.

One problem I see that they don't like to discipline any wrongdoings, the proper way for that is for the collective to decide at the 'commission for discipline''; my daughter was in constant terror of being referred to the 'discipline commission'; kids who where more violent generally ignored this threat, as a result there are few means of handling/discipline real offenders. In a way the result that stronger and more rowdy kids are favored and so they tend to impose their will on others.

Another problem is that somehow humans always build hierarchies, so there is no such thing as a egalitarian society, even in grade A. So unconstrained 'Bullying Betty' again tends to get her will against all others; now if her parent is a teacher in the institution than that will somehow get 'bullying Betty' another head start; In our place I could discern several hierarchies, somehow at the center there always were the kids whose parents worked at the institution.

Also kids tend to compare themselves to others, even if there are no grades they will create their own distinctions;

Now another major problem is that still kids will have to get some input from grown ups; the requirement to learn how to read and write will put you in front of a teacher; the teacher in our case would have to handle a loud class where every pupil would be on a different level ( they can walk out of classes ), I think the teacher in our case was not up to the task; now of course the results were blamed on our daughter; interestingly once she got out of the institution my daughter started to learn well.

So for me, as for other similar cases at our school the bright idea did not work out; We put our daughter into a general school, and she was thankful for the change, she does not look back;

I would say that the ideal of democratic schools is similar to the ideal of Communism: the ideal sounds great, but the implementation always turns the idea into shit.

</comment><comment><USER42> We have two problems:

1\. Forced activities (sports, music, dance, etc.) and having to drive and fly all over with kids for these activities. These activities do not let kids imagine or have long amounts of free-play, though the arts aren't terrible in that regard, and they do foster relationships which might help your kids make friends to go play and have free time. So it is a trade off.

2\. Too much homework. When homework is 3-4 hours a night in elementary school, something is wrong. If you are a strict homeschooler that has the kids working 24/7 or have kids in a private school where they spend 3 hours doing homework too often, talk to the teachers, and if that doesn't help, consider public school.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm fascinated by how schools methodically kill any sense of creativity. The OLPC team once conducted an experiment where they left a few tablets to kids who didn't know how to read nor how to use a computer. Yet, in 5 month, they learned how to hack Android and enable stuff that had been previously disabled by the OLPC team (I believe for security reasons, some sort of parental control). What this example illustrates is how schools create clone workers rather than hackers. And I strongly believe our society needs more hackers, as they apparently are the only ones to be able to foster our world's development.

</comment><comment><USER44> Coincidentally I just came upon the term "Concerted Cultivation" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerted_cultivation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerted_cultivation)) which describes the modern middle class typical parenting, the very thing that leaves kids with little time to play. Working back from that you get to the book _Unequal Childhoods_ which contrasts middle class and working class parenting ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_Childhoods#Parenting_St...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_Childhoods#Parenting_Styles)). I find the contrast interesting:

" _Concerted Cultivation_ : The parenting style, favored by middle-class families, in which parents encourage negotiation and discussion and the questioning of authority, and enroll their children in extensive organized activity participation. This style helps children in middle-class careers, teaches them to question people in authority, develops a large vocabulary, and makes them comfortable in discussions with people of authority. However, it gives the children a sense of entitlement.

" _Achievement of Natural Growth_ : The parenting style, favored by working- class and lower-class families, in which parents issue directives to their children rather than negotiations, encourage the following and trusting of people in authority positions, and do not structure their children's daily activities, but rather let the children play on their own. This method has benefits that prepare the children for a job in the "working" or "poor-class" jobs, teaches the children to respect and take the advice of people in authority, and allows the children to become independent at a younger age."

\----

When contrasted against Achievement of Natural Growth it's not so surprising that parents have decided to take another path. Simple romanticism about the past isn't really that helpful. Just kick the kid out of the house and let them play? People talk about the lack of peers that aren't similarly scheduled up, but I see kids all the time who are left free... and I'm not comfortable with how those kids are developing in that environment. Not that they aren't fine playmates, but it's not a kind of parenting I would want to imitate. And a lot of the efforts pushing for more structured time (more afterschool activities, full day kindergarten, universal preschool) are directed towards those kids that need it. But of course we all get washed up in it, even if increased structure is only needed by a segment of the population.

There are other models. Consider for instance _Tools Of The Mind_ ([http://www.toolsofthemind.org/](http://www.toolsofthemind.org/)), a preschool program that has shown surprising success. It incorporates a lot of pretend play, but adds structure to that pretend play. But it's not authoritarian structure. Adults are really important to children, we have a lot to offer. We can enhance play, get kids out of ruts, enhance the environment, help kids match up their desires with productive paths of learning. Which also means giving them independence at the right time. And sometimes at the wrong time. And sometimes kids need to be understimulated. But it's not that simple.

From the article: "You can't teach creativity; all you can do is let it blossom. Little children, before they start school, are naturally creative." I don't buy that. _Teaching_ creativity might be going a bit far, but it can absolutely be nurtured and inspired. Children, when just left alone, DO NOT DO WELL. I know just interjecting myself in a kids play for 30 seconds, at the right time, can considerably improve the creativity of their play. My nephew has been pretty into playing with blocks lately, but kind of repeating himself. I started making a bridge with a ramp, and he's been obsessed with those forms for the last few days, trying new configurations, larger structures, bridges across corners, all sorts of stuff. Real creativity, he's not just copying what I did. But he needed a little inspiration.

Do you just let kids work out all their problems between each other on their own? Sometimes kids work things out well. Sometimes they fight, often they bully, sometimes they are deliberately cruel, or depressingly meek. Setting up a bunch of rules is a bad solution too. Never hit! Now you can't play fight with paper towel rolls. And you can't learn how to interact physically without hurting each other. Always share! Or: always ask before taking! Or: turns! But sometimes one kid _really_ wants something, and the other kid just happens to be holding that thing. Or sometimes a kid is just immitating, they ignored the toy until they saw someone else enjoying it. But the negotiated response is more sophisticated than any rule. Ask, trade, offer, come up with a creative way to both play with the toy. Acknowledge that not all kids communicate well with language, but body language is often more than enough to work on. But this doesn't happen on its own. As the kids get older, they don't communicate constructively on their own, or resolve their own conflicts, _but they can do those things_. They need help. Not rules, not structures to define their interactions, but they need engaged adults (or older children).

I don't really disagree with this article. But it's a critique that lacks empathy with the parental decisions that got us to where we are, and it does not respond to the concerns those parents have had. I think there's a way to achieve both, parenting isn't a choice somewhere on the line between two extremes, there's no limit to the number of novel and engaged choices available to us.

<comment><USER45> A good preschool will teach everything you mention, while letting kids play pretty much 100% of the time, with just enough adult interaction to provide structure and guidance. It exists and no one campaigns for it to be longer or stricter. Preschool is not the problem, and I don't think it's the subject of the article. It's ages 4-18.

I don't remember any lesson that adults were to be questioned and authority challenged in my preppy, over-scheduled suburban upbringing. Mostly I just internalized the value of sitting, shutting up, doing what I was told, being smart, getting the right answer, and laboring constantly on meaningless work products.

You've identified the useful 10% or so of school and used it to argue against a straw man of no school and an idle life.

<comment><USER44> The kids in my life are young at the moment, so I'm biased towards the experiences at those younger ages – and certainly more poisonous structures lurk as they get older. On the other hand, I'm not sure why you think I'm talking about school. The article is mostly not about school, and my reaction isn't about school, it's about the hours outside of school.

And no, preschools do not generally allow children to be physical with each other, and they tend towards rule-based conflict resolution instead of direct engagement, which are some of the specific examples I brought up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Excellent article, can't agree with it more. What can we do about this? Home schooling them? Move to countryside and telecommute for job? I can accept either of the options, but the sad truth is that, we can not find the right communities for kids to do non-constructed play anymore, as everyone else is doing what the article describes no matter where we go and what we do. The only option is probably to have many kids so they play together within the family, while moving to countryside.

</comment><comment><USER41> Children play less on their own, because they MUST be controlled; on every level of society the level of control is tightened, everything must be regulated by some authority.

Eric Schmidt is right 'surveillance ... is the nature of our society'

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/13/eric-schmidt- go...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/13/eric-schmidt-google-nsa- surveillance)

Maybe its just that society is becoming more and more authoritarian ?

</comment><comment><USER47> [http://archive.org/details/playman00groogoog](http://archive.org/details/playman00groogoog)

</comment><comment><USER48> This is awesome.

My early childhood I was more free, the school had less rules and structure, and more importantly, I had loads of free time that my mother let me spend with my friends that lived in the same building.

I remember how we learned not only physical stuff, but also theoretical one, purely out of curiosity, like one night where we all sat on the ground, and wondered why the sky was blue even at night. (resulting into a couple of us that knew how to read go read books, so that then we could impress others with our newfound knowledge, resulting into everyone learning why the sky was blue).

Also, when I was around 5 years old, I had a female friend on school that I grew very close, we became natural leaders of our class, we were the most intelligent students (not hard when your class has 8 people, the female friend was asian, and my parents gave me lots of books since before I could read), the most playful ones (when others wanted a new game, they would ask us to invent it), and although individually we were the usual bully victims (since we were the nerdy types with glasses), we two were respected, other kids looked to us to what to do when shit happened (like when one girl got hurt by a bee, me and my female friend quickly figured how to carry her from the place where she was, and find a adult, and ice).

Also I visited her home a couple times, and although I was very young, I might say that I DID saw her as someone I wanted to be with the rest of my life.

Then the first grade came, it was in a huge school (I moved from a school with 80 students to one with 7500 students), my parents told me (correctly) that now things would be "serious" and that I would start to learn how to work (I guess, "work" as in be in a corporate environment).

Although I changed schools many times after, some things were constant:

First, I did not gave a fuck for whatever the school taught, my first 2 years (first and second grade) teachers saw me as the stupid kid (because I never finished my copy of the blackboard, getting distracted by other things, and also because I frequently failed to finish my tests on time, both situations would result into me being berated, and then me crying), when I learned to "play along" instead I became the genius (ie: all tests I had the maximum score), not because I learned what teachers taught me, but because I already (before first grade) had as hobby read the school books the fastest as I could (I love reading, sometimes I spend 3, 4 hours daily reading wikipedia, or everything linked here in HN), and because I disliked getting berated for not copying stuff or not doing homework.

But that time, I also learned that the other kids were NOT my friends, they were competitors, they were people to crush, destroy or annihilate, with better grades, or just go and punch them in the face when they piss me off and I will get away with it, because if I avoided that, they would do with me... Until the fourth grade I was bullied heavily (well, I was bullied until I left university), but on when I reached the fifth grade I started to learn that being cruel, being fearsome, destroying other people, made them bully you less... I still could not bring myself to throw a rock into a girl head (like some guy in my seventh grade class did), because I thought that going to downright evil was not the day, but doing any bullying that would not get teachers worried, was worth it, like sabotaging other people, setting them to fail, usually all that as revenge, never first strike, because then people would come for you, but revenge, ooh, that was sweet. The sweetest one was kicking a guy mouth in the middle of a group photo (all students of the school, lined up in a ramp, with all staff of the school looking, the guy was annoying me the entire day, and decided as final trick of the day, steal my hat and make me lose my balance so the photo captured me in ankward manner, and I decided that the best course of action was kick him in the mouth so hard that made him tumble down the ramp, and made all girls run around screaming in panic).

Only about 4 years ago (I am 25) now I started to realise how all this is fucked up, I became a sort of psycho, in my final school years I envied the columbine people and wanted to do the same...

Now I am playing catchup, my first kiss I was 23 (at 23 years old, is the first time that I felt for a girl what I felt for that one when I was 5/6), I left college realising that if I had not joined it in first place and instead took a job, I would be better at the job and would have more money (currently 50% of my money is to pay debt, and my net worth is deeply negative), and I have no friends (except one of the guys of the building I lived when I was 5, IF I can really consider him a friend, it is already 2 years that I don't visit him), at weekends I have nothing to do but stay at home or see my SO, when I need money for my startup, there is noone to ask, when I want to play split screen multiplayer games, there is noone to ask either, board games is a family thing only, and when former school people come to talk with me (usually because they need me...), I still feel really weird (ie: I feel lots of things, among them desire to revenge, fear, desire to murder them, ressentment, frustation...).

I feel like if my life between 8 years old and 20 years old was non-existant, like a black hole in my history, something that left more negative things in me than positive.

I wish there was a way, to do it all over again, to learn how to have friends, to have playful time with people I can trust, to not have this stupid debts, to not be unhealthy like I am now (I only learned how to eat properly recently, I am struggling very heard to get my weight below 100kg, I did managed to reach 99kg last year, but I am 118kg now), or not be weak as I am now (not having much physical play means I struggle to carry everyday items with my arms sometimes, my dad that never went to the gym and is a engineer, can carry stuff much heavier than I can, my grandpa is always much stronger than me, if he wants he can lift me! also he never went to the gym, and his hobby right now is lottery statistics, he spent most of his time of the day writing numbers in a sheet).

My first girlfriend broke with me after I told her I would not send my kids to school, no matter what. (in Brazil this is dangerous, since it is a crime and government DO arrest you if you refuse to send kids to school).

I feel like mandatory "education" is one of the most evil things you can do to a kid.

I DO prize some sort of schools, but only if the kids WANT to be there, because a school where schools don't want to be there, they use their time ruining the day of those that want. (ie: when a teacher DID managed to get my attention, usually talking about physics, someone else would be throwing erasers at the teacher, or kicking my chair, or hiding my backpack, or atheists stealing my bible and playing soccer with it, then calling themselves rational and reasonable...)

<comment> vezzy-fnord Thank you for sharing this story.

Have you read any books by John Taylor Gatto or Charlotte Iserbyt? If not, the entire compulsory school agenda will be swiftly illuminated once you do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Growing up in Bulgaria (I was born 1976) I caught the last years of "communism" (there was never such thing really), but I caught a lot of good time as a kid.

A lot of the classic bulgarian kid movies were about kids roaming the streets of the city, village, forest, etc. For example the whole family goes to a tourist resort, beach, and then you see kids of different ages going together somewhere.

One of my favourite shows as a kid was Verano Azul (spanish - Blue Summer) ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verano_azul](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verano_azul)) - it was very popular on Bulgaria, and it also reflected the kind of play we used to have in there.

One of my other popular shows (Blake's 7, we did not had Star Trek back then) - was also very popular - outside we would play as characters from the show - like Zen, Oracle, Blake and other characters from the show. Sometimes few, othertimes dozen, and few times we were like 40-50 kids gathered from group ages from 1st to 8 or 9th grade playing together (bullying was all the time there I guess, I've never noticed it seriously - it wasn't an open concept, neither taboo - more like unknown thing - that just happens and you deal with it. It's different now that you know it, and have a child on your own, and live in USA - like me).

As kids, often we would go to the nearest construction site (usually high-rise building in construction) and do stupid things. It was the norm to fight with sticks - plastic or wood, throw stones, rocks at each other - and almost everyday come with blood here and there (no big deal, I survived).

My biggest adventure by far was, when me and my one year older cousin (he was 6 or 7 then) took the road to walk from one city (Chernomoretz, Bulgaria) to another (Burgas) - here is the route on google maps - [http://goo.gl/EfRMsK](http://goo.gl/EfRMsK) \- It's 26km - and we walked, took some bus, did a lot of stupid things (bent signs, ate stuff that we should not do). But overall had pretty good time. We started off like 8:00-9:00AM in the morning, and showed up at my grandparents apartment somewhere in afternoon. It was all because I thought we need an important plastic truck which was there.

Then with my other grandma we went couple of times to her village in the summer, and there I would roam the village, river, forest ( [http://goo.gl/8HyhbQ](http://goo.gl/8HyhbQ) ) - and come back late at night, sometimes 10:00pm, sometimes 2:00am - and I was 2nd or 3rd grade.

I guess she was afraid, but one thing she knew, or kind of expected it - <USER2> that other people if told that I'm lost would look for me, scorn me if they had to.

In short: I had respect of everyone bigger than me, and everyone else too. The situation in USA currently is that the first time you open your mouth against some kid to scorn him, and you might end up in prison. And that might be the right thing to do... But it's very unhelpful, since the kids no longer respect you.

It's quite different now with our son (soon to be 6) - he grows much faster than me emotionally, intellectually - he asks things that I would've asked much later in my kids' life. On top of that he's supposed to start his real life working much older than me (if he's willing to finish uni/ etc.)

Got the "Dangerous book for Boys" and would seen read it to him. I have to learn some american stuff after all (for example I do only understand the rules of soccer and basketball) :)

<comment><USER14> Bulgaria in the 80s sounds about like suburban Wisconsin in the 80s.

One interesting observation is that many women (such as my mom) were stay at home moms or part timers at most. Despite Mom being around all the time, we roamed pretty wild. Modern standard is to have both parents work AKA latchkey kids, etc. First guess would be without Mom (and neighbor Moms) around, kids would go totally wild compared to old days. The opposite has happened, which is interesting. I know when we drove our mom nuts, we would be deported to the park, and we were hardly the only kids to drive our moms nuts and end up playing in the park.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> [http://fairplayforchildren.org/](http://fairplayforchildren.org/) has a lot of good play related resources, it is a very small organisation so go easy on the site!

</comment><comment><USER51> The pendulum is swinging back already. I think this article is a few years behind the trend. Also, the idea that US schools are just about testing, testing, testing is a bunch of Quatsch.

</comment><comment><USER52> slightly HS : I find it difficult to start to read an article when the first image caption has such a blatant error "In the country of Le Grandes Meaulnes" ( vs [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Grand_Meaulnes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Grand_Meaulnes) )

(but then I remember it's hard to master a second language and that this comment is probably full of 'blatant' errors)

</comment><comment><USER53> Countries with a billion USD Lego budget would go a long way in saving many social evils imo.

</comment><comment><USER54> in my neighborhood growing up, from time to time a parent would come and try 'coach' us during pickup football games. At this point about 1/3 of us would quit playing. Buzzkilling.

</comment><comment><USER23> The author makes a good point and seemingly provides good data to support their thesis, but it doesn't overcome the bias I have against several argument templates which are almost always wrong:

* Idealization of "hunter-gatherer" societies -- this is the root of many a fad diet and self-improvement methodology, but whenever I'm faced with a choice of doing something a hunter-gatherer would have done or doing what I can do now in modernity, I almost always choose modernity. Medicine, sanitation, pooping indoors, and not dying at 20 is very appealing. The "freedom" afforded to people in the past is a great attractor (as a communist in undergrad, I'd frequently hear how people in pre-industrial societies rarely worked, and how THAT was the inflection point where everything went to shit). But ultimately, most of us agree the future is better than the past.

* Argument ad Evolution -- Evolution frequently produces working machines, but it nearly never produces optimal machines. No architect would design a building with one central support structure, and no camera-maker would occlude the light sensor with a wire. Most of the advances of human society have come from disregarding evolution and the "natural" order of things, not from adhering to them.

* "____ cannot be taught" \-- in this case, creativity. Artistic schools have existed for millennia; whole areas of modernity are dedicated to creatively solving problems, and it would be very surprising if there were really no verbally expressible heuristics or even systematic exercises that lead to a person subjected to them becoming better at creating ideas. I'm not sure what the measures used in the article are, and am skeptical of them because good measures are hard to create. But I can note that society as a whole remains fairly creative, and that we haven't descended into a pit of Idiocracy as of yet.

As with most things, it's likely that some combination of the two approaches is correct. The current educational system and parental culture could probably use significant overhaul, but it's also not currently based in very much science. It's likely that whatever optimal solution exists relies on brain machinery created by evolution, but the way that machinery is honed will be by a process that has never existed in nature (similar to how the fat-creation process is honed by hyperstimulating foods). I would personally like it if the best way for education to happen were by a process that was fun, engaging, and centered around the autonomy of learners, but that may not be the case, and I'd rather have well-educated and capable future generations of humans than have humans that are as similar as possible to their ancestors.

<comment><USER55> > Medicine, sanitation, pooping indoors, and not dying at 20 is very > appealing.

IIRC, the low life expectancy of hunter-gatherers is mostly due to the high infant/child mortality. You can see similar life expectancy graphs in several animal species. Basically, once you reach a certain age, you have a high probability of living up to a decently high age.

Regarding "Medicine, sanitation, pooping indoors", well, all of these became problems because of the Agricultural Revolution, where people lived in densely populated areas together with their domesticated animals. Diseases slowly spread from the animals to the humans, and the density and lack of sanitization increased mortality by helping disease spread quickly. The Agricultural Revolution also forced humans to do back breaking jobs for which our bodies were not built for (working hunched over in the fields, or carrying heavy weights on our backs), and shrunk our varied diet into mostly eating grains and grain-based foods.

So I think you should probably re-think your poor view of hunter-gatherer societies.

<comment><USER23> People always quote this, and I always wonder why it makes any difference.

People in hunter-gatherer societies weren't "more healthy" than we are (as you imply in a later comment). Most people in hunter-gatherer societies died as infants. I don't consider that healthy, and I consider infants people.

 _On average_ , most hunter-gatherers died at 20. In reality, virtually all hunter-gatherers died at 0, and the few that survived might live to 60.

Again: this is the "things were better in the past" / "evolution is always right" argument template, and it's virtually always wrong.

<comment><USER55> It makes a difference because people assume that it's been a constant improvement ever since hunter-gatherer times, and it probably wasn't. I'm saying that the quality of life for most people probably went downhill ever since the Agricultural Revolution, and what humanity has been doing ever since was trying improve it using medicine, science, sanitization, and more.

I'm not saying that the hunter-gatherers were healthier than we are _today_ (note my use of "might've" in the original post), but evidence shows that the lives of people in post-hunter-gatherer societies was worse.

Life expectancy went up considerably only in the very recent past: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time) [Note the reduction of life expectancy in the Neolithic (agricultural revolution).]

Anyways, I'm not an expert on the subject and I don't have the energy to start going through papers and digging up more rigorous data.

<comment><USER23> How can you say quality of life has gone down when most people from hunter- gatherer times died as infants?

Dying as an infant would be a pretty shit quality of life in my book, I don't know about you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Putting Teeth in Rackspace Public Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2014/07/02/putting-teeth-in-our-public-cloud/

<comment><USER2> IPA is a fantastic idea. Some questions:

1) I am actually curious how IPA is deployed to the ramdisks. Any pointers?

2) The turn around time for provisioning is now dependent on download speed etc. When provisioning batches this could be a problem, right?

3)Did you use any kind of CDN (for image persistence) when dealing with provisioning in different availability zones?

4) Does IPA also implement SSL/Auth?

<comment><USER3> Great questions!

1) We boot a CoreOS image over PXE. IPA is built using Docker, exported as a filesystem, and runs in a linux container via systemd-nspawn. It can take config options via command line or kernel command line. The build system is here. [1]

2) It could, yes. Images are downloaded directly from Swift, and both the client and the server has 10gig links. We're also investigating multicast and bittorrent as alternatives for image distribution.

3) Not sure if you mean agent images or OS images... regardless, at Rackspace, each region runs as its own standalone cloud - so there shouldn't be any communication between data centers when provisioning. Does that answer your question?

4) We're working on implementing client certificate checking for communication between IPA and Ironic. The agents also live on an isolated VLAN that is only accessible by Ironic and Swift.

[1] [https://github.com/openstack/ironic-python- agent/tree/master...](https://github.com/openstack/ironic-python- agent/tree/master/imagebuild/coreos)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very insightful. I enjoyed reading the personal view into OnMetal's journey @ Rackspace.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! Author here, happy to answer any questions...

<comment><USER5> What did you have to do at the BIOS & firmware level? It's the first time I've heard of being able to customise that kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you plan to offer lower-end OnMetal nodes? For example, 16 GB of RAM, a quad-core Xeon E3 processor, and a 256 GB SSD? Presumably you could put several such nodes in one chassis to make that kind of configuration economical.

<comment><AUTHOR> _avoiding too many forward looking statements_

As a general principle we will add more form factors.

For your specific example hardware, that kind of specification could be achieved using the Open Compute Micro Servers / Server Card designs, instead of the full-on 2 processor windmill designs:

[http://www.opencompute.org/assets/motherboardandserverdesign...](http://www.opencompute.org/assets/motherboardandserverdesign/Open_Compute_Project_Micro- Server_Card_Specification_v0.5.pdf)

As you make smaller servers, things like HA-Networking become a higher portion of the cost too, so it might be more feasible if we dropped the 2x10g Bond and went to a single 10g port for example, would losing the HA networking but having those kinds of specs be interesting to you?

<comment><USER7> I wonder if 2x2.5G (if you can get it to work) would be better than 1x10G.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not directly related to the article, but asking here: what did you use to make those diagrams? It looks like the Unicode box drawing characters, but I was wondering if it was from a tool or handcrafted.

<comment><USER9> This is what Paul used: [http://bramp.github.io/js-sequence- diagrams](http://bramp.github.io/js-sequence-diagrams)</comment></comment>


Knowledge Graph: Wikipedia on steroids, or the beginning of the end for the web? - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/129566-googles-knowledge-graph-wikipedia-on-steroids-or-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-the-web <comment><USER2> Excellent point made in the article: Google's pulling data from sites and displaying right on the search page might cut off the oxygen of some content creators.</comment>


Fallout 4 Service Discovery and Relay - <AUTHOR> https://getcarina.com/blog/fallout-4-service-discovery-and-relay/ <comment><USER2> One application comes to mind for this: watch for new screenshots (assuming they automatically get put into a directory for Fallout 4 screenshots) and add the in-world coordinates to the EXIF data.

<comment><USER3> Other ideas:

\- a fitbit (pipbit?) for Fallout, track how many km/miles ran/walked, how many km while carrying how much kg of equipment, theoretical calories lost

\- since it seems to synchronize stats and inventory, you can map where the player killed most enemies/took most stimpaks so you can get a heatmap of enemy-rich zones and rank them by difficulty - divide killed enemies by health lost (or used stimpaks)

\- there are sites like fallout4map.com which track the location of unique and hardcoded items, you can automate this now

<comment><USER4> This could be interesting. I created fallout4map.com, and if it could automagically track a player's pipboy locations, that would be awesome.

I tried decoding the binary data for the pipboy app, but didn't have much success. Perhaps someone smarter than me will be able to crack it.

<comment><USER5> I will take a quick look at decompiling the android app this afternoon

<comment><USER4> It's a Unity app, so `apktool` works well to get out all the assets. Nothing is obfuscated. There's also sample pipboy data file there too (for the demo mode).

<comment><USER5> Sounds like you've looked into this already, any chance you published your findings to spare the rest of us the hassle? :)

<comment><USER4> Normally I keep notes on decompiling game files, but this time I didn't unfortunately :/

But I didn't get too far anyway - the DemoMode.bin file contains the demo data. There's a list of locations in a custom binary format, but the titles are readable.

I tried modifying the values to make them all visible, but the app threw a parsing exception when trying to load my modified file.

Hope that helps!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be incredibly cool to have a script that automatically manages your inventory while playing the game, e.g. the player picks up all items and has the script auto-drop them if they don't meet certain requirements (value/weight ratio, duplicates, etc.). I'm excited to see where this goes!

<comment><USER7> I'd be all over that.

I find the way the game displays inventory (particularly guns) quite irritating to say the least. I want to see one ammo type at a time (since you need minimum one gun per ammo type) and then to see a comparison (damage, rate of fire, accuracy, and specials).

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's also one of the very few complaints I have about FO4. The whole inventory system is designed as if limited to what you can do with a controller. Why can't you deposit all junk from your companion automatically? Why can't you get all inventory not currently used by them? Why can't you craft/replace with power armor pieces that are in storage?

I hope some patches/mods for the inventory system come out soon.

<comment><USER9> I find this to be a pervasive problem with Bethesda games starting a few years after The Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind was released. They pack an insane amount of complexity into their games then provide utterly feeble tools to manage it or refuse to invest time into them as that complexity grows from game to game (especially their inventory system which hasn't changed much since Oblivion). Nothing demonstrates this better than Fallout 4's base building mechanic which is leagues better (and more complicated) than in any other game I've played. You can literally build a downtown Sanctuary with a dozen 10 story tall skyscrapers with farmland and electrical infrastructure but doing so using the Workshop as it is now (months before the release of the official game editor) is absolutely maddening and down right impractical. No 2d map or overhead camera, no alignment with complex terrain like building foundations, no templating, zero interface to manage the settlers (the current community concensus is to give each settler a different hat or outfit for each available job!), and it's just down right Unintuitive in every way. The mechanic overall feels like it was part of the game design from day 1 but the interface they give you to use it was made in a weekend.

Bethesda knows their games are bought for replayability and community mods so it seems that they make a lot of sacrifices no other gaming company would, knowing that the more annoying it is the faster some modder will totally replace it with far superior execution. To be fair though, no other company cranks out fantastic open world games that are as good as Bethesda's on such a regular basis. All of this pays off when a five year old game has graphics as good as a newly released one except with half a decade of damn near professional effort by thousands of modders.

<comment> saiya-jin the last bit ain't true - from my experience last month. had a off-gaming period for last 5 years and didn't play Skyrim when it was launched. sat to it 2 months ago, with all datadiscs, patches, put all interesting (not only) graphic mods, which had years to gain maturity and compatibility. So I thought I will have the best possible version of the game, better than creators ever aimed for.

The game looked meh on all maxed, but that isn't a dealbreaker for me (after all, I still sometimes run old Deux Ex 1, probably the best game ever in its genre). it was boring like hell, and the whole game screamed quantity-over quality. FYI - I played all previous TES games vigorously, starting properly with Daggerfall (didn't have good enough rig for Arena back in those days, but I played it too a bit). This was just nothing-special experience, and I uninstalled it after few hours of gaming.

2 weeks ago installed Witcher 3, and those games are uncomparable. 21st century meets 80's arcade gaming (heck, not even). Visual side is one aspect, but this game is simply better in every possible way.

<comment><USER10> Had an off-gaming period of 5 years as well, and trying to get back into it. Just built a nice rig, to max out these new games. Is there a texture pack I can get for the original Deus Ex (1) or something? I played Deus Ex HR two years ago and I was blown away by it. Had a talk with a friend of mine who is also a Deus Ex fan and he told me that Deus Ex 1 is better than HR in every conceivable aspect. Of course I can't wait for Mankind Divided to come out, but I'd very much like to play Deus Ex 1 (for historical reasons) without my eyes smarting. If not I just might get Deus Ex HR Director's Cut off of Steam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> FLUX-YOU It's possible that the client is capable of more than just being a server. Running

        help "Bethesda.NET" 0

in the console reveals some interesting commands, such as login, checking if the player is logged in, getting some profile stats and whatnot.

So of interest is whether the scripting engine (Papyrus) is capable of accessing the network or changing anything about the network commands (especially destination/content). If so, that's possibly bad because a lot of players have a propensity to just run as admin[0] due to script extenders in the various games, which are required for a lot of the most popular plugins (e.g. SkyUI).

Used innocently, this could be really cool for modders. Check for updates or even download patches while the game is running for example. Or, hell, multiplayer.

There's also a couple of other commands I found interesting in the game console, such as PyConsole and LuaConsole, which are described as Python and Lua consoles, but running these didn't do anything for me. Those would be fun to play with in game.

[0][http://skse.silverlock.org/skse_readme.txt](http://skse.silverlock.org/skse_readme.txt)

</comment><comment><USER11> Would be interesting to play around with. Imagine having a "Twitch plays Fallout 4", but with someone playing the game properly but Twitch gets to control the inventory, armour, weapons, map etc... all via the pipboy api.

</comment><comment><USER12> thanks for taking the time to write this up. (an upvote did not seem like enough).

<comment><USER13> agreed. very cool. cant wait to see what someone does with this.

<comment><USER14> Sadly I expect the next thing will be Bethesda encrypting this data.

<comment><USER9> Why? Bethesda has a history of making games with best in class modability and the tools they release for moders are fleshed out versions of what they use for designing the game (which usually takes a few months, FO4 tool expected early 2016).

Hell, with scripting extenders and graphics mods, some of their games like Morrowind can become nearly indistinguishable from modern AAA games nearly 13 years later. Bethesda knows this and I can't imagine them locking down anything that could be used to make their games better by their community for decades to come.

<comment><USER15> Because other idiots are exposing their PS4 to the internet

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So there is no authentication on the API endpoint? I have my PS4 connected directly to the Internet to avoid NAT issues, and I wonder whether the API would be available openly as well.

<comment><USER17> Theorically, knowing your ip, people would be able to connect to your fallout 4.

<comment><USER16> Or practically, if they would scan the entire IPv4 space, which doesn't take too long on a decent connection (5min with 10Gbps, [https://zmap.io/](https://zmap.io/))

<comment><USER18> Wonder if any relevant strings have shown up in Shodan searches yet.

Still, I'd imagine most PCs and game consoles are behind a firewall and ports aren't forwarded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> With this we can prioritize healing items and auto use them when on low health!

<comment><USER20> Would be nice to auto cook all meat when at a cooking station.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is very cool. I have to wonder though what you could do with it, like I don't mean to devalue the OP but I see a lot of people here discussing the possibilities (inventory management etc.), but what is there to stop you from doing that with traditional modding? I guess with consoles this might be useful (although I heard consoles can play PC mods this time around), but as far as the PC goes its probably far easier just to use make an actual mod for the game that does what you want instead of bouncing it around wirelessly with a relay.

<comment><USER21> If people downvoting me could explain why, that would be nice. I'm not trying to downplay the OP's creation and I think it's really cool. I was trying to reply to the people in this thread because I feel like they are praising it for the wrong reasons. It's not like we can finally access your inventory programmatically and script it for the first time ever, you could already do all of that stuff with regular modding, and it'd probably be a lot easier too. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if so I'd like to know how.

As an analogy, to me it'd be like praising WIFI for finally allowing us to communicate between computers on a network.

<comment><USER22> Didn't downvote, am the author of the write up. Since I don't run Windows in the house any more, there's little opportunity for mods (I'm playing on the PS4). Tinkering with the network was fun in its own right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Only level 12 by November 20th? The desire to play must not have been that strong. He already got side tracked with something that isn't getting him any more loot.

<comment><USER22> Between settlement building and figuring this out, what else is there? ;)

In all seriousness, I made a new character for investigating the relay and fuzzing the server when I wanted so I wouldn't be screwing with my first character.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If someone wants to chip in for a copy of XBox One Fallout 4, I'd be happy to look at adding support for it this weekend - it's 100AUD which is a little crazy.

</comment><comment><USER25> Incidentally, flexlm/port 27000 used to be how a variety of apps were licensed. Much pain was had when the license manager would occasionally go out to lunch.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just love the level of sniffing you can do to learn.</comment>


Tips for Reading Mac Security Stories - <AUTHOR> http://db.tidbits.com/article/10218 <comment><USER2> A really smart article written by an observer who is immersed in the Mac security research community. I can't find anything in here to disagree with, except perhaps the implication that Windows XP SP2 wasn't also more secure than Leopard.</comment>


23andme: Evil Or The Way Of The Future? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/17/23andme-evil-or-the-way-of-the-future/ <comment><USER2> Navigenics (<http://www.navigenics.com>) is a KPCB-funded biotech that does something similar.

</comment><comment><USER3> $999 is way cheap for 23andme to be selling this, the microarrays cost $650 each before they are analyzed. As per a Techcrunch comment, I suspect they are subsidizing or selling below cost which will probably work out because of the rapidly falling costs in this area.

<comment><USER4> What materials are those arrays built out of? Do they require any special (laser trimmed) components? Special lithography? I smell an industry ripe to be commoditized by a startup.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what it actually takes to manufacture them -- there's definitely some lithography that goes into it but I don't know much beyond that. You might be able to convert an existing microprocessor plant into a DNA microarray plant but i don't really know.

This is the one that I believe 23andme is purchasing in bulk -- or, at least it is the highest end microarray sold by the company 23andme gets their arrays from. <http://www.illumina.com/pagesnrn.ilmn?ID=70>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the NY Times article which is currently a broken link in the post:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17dna.html?pagewanted=a...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17dna.html?pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER6> 23andMe must be paying out the nose for PR. There are at least 2 other well- funded companies in this space, and I don't see _those_ folks getting features in the New York Times....

<comment><USER3> They have also presented the information in the best way I have ever seen such genetic information presented. This alone makes their product more appealing and more interesting to journalists. Take a look at the copy on this page -- <https://www.23andme.com/gen101/variation/speed/> \-- it's damn good copy.

<comment><USER6> True. They've got a couple of science writers on staff, and I'm impressed with their sense of style.

Still, that kind of stuff just doesn't explain a feature article in the New York Times. DeCODE is the big fish in this area, and I've heard next to nothing in the media about them. This seems like a blatant case of good PR.

(with the obvious caveat concerning Google and Sergey and Sergey's wife, of course)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Dead simple, yet amazing realtime web analytics for FREE - <AUTHOR> https://analytics.statvoo.com/ <comment><USER2> Anything that's hosted and free is likely to be tracking you to make money off you.

Except if it's an analytics tool, where it's likely to be tracking _your customers_ to make money off them.

<comment><AUTHOR> This free service is completely free;

While there are options to upgrade to paid plans with additional features, it is possible to stay on a completely free plan forever.

Your visitors are not targeted in any way other than by yourself if you choice to tag them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Much simpler than Statvoo, but if you're into simple services like this, [https://trackingco.de](https://trackingco.de) is my project and I like it better.

See [https://trackingco.de/public/mzfzx9](https://trackingco.de/public/mzfzx9) for a public page with data from [https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/module- linker/](https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/module-linker/)

<comment><USER4> Why don't you explain why yours is 'better'?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Web analytics that are always realtime with a very simple integration.

Integrating into SPA/Angular/React is so easy that you don't even need to tell it a page or event has changed!

It's FREE for however long you want it.</comment>


Introducing Mozilla Bespin, a Canvas-based IDE - <AUTHOR> http://labs.mozilla.com/2009/02/introducing-bespin/

<comment><USER2> This is all sorts of awesome.

My current editor of choice is vi(m) because it is available everywhere, doesn't clutter the interface with things I never use, supports (at least syntax highlighting for) every language I care about, and has powerful keyboard shortcuts. If I weren't so anti-chording, emacs would be just as good.

New editors these days tend to focus mainly on one language, like Eclipse with Java, so the interface gets bloated with things that are only useful for that language. I've tried PyDev in Eclipse and it just feels foreign. Sure, I could customize Eclipse if I felt like it, but I'd have to learn plenty of SWT and the Eclipse codebase itself to do so. I already know HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so customizing Bespin should be far more trivial.

If I were running Bespin on a machine I control, it could theoretically access any machine I can ssh into (though the security implications of this merit further thought). If enough people use it, it will have decent support for every language I care about and powerful keyboard shortcuts (hopefully borrowed from vi wholesale). Since it's built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I can easily customize it to work how I want it to, adding in the language support and keyboard shortcuts myself if need be.

I'll probably be hacking on this when I wake up.

<comment><USER3> You can try vi in javascript:

<http://gpl.internetconnection.net/vi/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very impressive. Though I suggest you try it with Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 or Webkit Nightly (Firefox 3 works, but it's slow for large files).

I tried to create browser-based high-performance text manipulation application myself, but I never imagined to use Canvas.

For performance I used "contentEditable" DOM attribute [1] to piggyback on browser's native code. According to my unscientific subjective tests it's faster than Bespin's approach - a bit faster on FF3.1B2, a lot faster on FF3. Plus it works also on Explorer and Chrome (a kind of, it's buggy and freezes on large files).

Anyway, finally I had to switch to desktop application as the other parts of JavaScript/DOM/browser were not fast enough and also working with local files from JavaScript was very painful.

Still, after creating basically the same application twice, once in a browser and once as a desktop app, I can vouch for the bright future of fully browser based applications, once the performance would get there.

Going back from HTML+CSS+JavaScript to fiddling with widgets felt like going back from Python to C++ (and mind you, I fiddled with widgets in Python). You get the speed, but you pay the price elsewhere (my code more than doubled and user interface got a lot uglier).

Good luck to Mozilla/Opera/WebKit/Chrome folks, browsers as a platform are becoming awesome.

[1] [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web- apps/2007-10-26/multipage/se...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web- apps/2007-10-26/multipage/section-contenteditable.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's impressive that they can do this in a browser, but some parts of the video were pretty funny. We can keep up with the user's typing! We can clone the Finder! We can measure and ellipsize text! We have layout managers! Welcome to 1995, Web 2.0.

<comment><USER6> heh eclipse and netbeans cant keep up with my typing most of the time, and even emacs has problems with undo / redo in large files

<comment><USER7> really? I'm willing to bet that any file that would be "big" for emacs, would _melt_ eclipse, word or any other text editor, except maybe for vim.

<comment><USER8> Actually, editing very large (hundred-megabyte) text files is hard. (Example of real world use: mysqldump files.)

Emacs thrashes. Vim thrashes. Eclipse? I laugh. However, the text-mode editor "joe" loads the file quickly and doesn't thrash.

<comment><USER4> That's why I love SciTE. I just tried it with 126 MB text file and it didn't break a sweat.

<http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html>

Bonus: you can use it in your own wxPython application. Some brave soul wrapped it and made available as wxStyledTextCtrl widget.

<http://www.yellowbrain.com/stc/index.html>

BTW that's what I finished using for my app I mentioned in my other comment in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its kinda cool but I have a few problems (not that I don't want them to continue with the project).

I personally have problems with this entire everything in the cloud. I like having things under my own control. I like having my own editor be local. I do use ssh so I can edit from other's computers. I also sync my various computers so that I can edit from any of them. I guess part of it is a nostalgic feeling. I just believe somethings are better left local.

My other issue which is just an extension of the first is how they talk about writing a sort function. Yes its cool you can write a sort function but they are reinventing the wheel as he admits. 'Normally I would just use a unix command.' (paraphrase). No longer will all of your computing actions tie together. Learning to do something in Bespin doesn't carry over to other actions on the web. Particularly if its with another company. In unix learning to use vim allows you to not only write code but edit email. Learning wc lets you use it with code, with email, with anything you write.

<comment><USER10> Bespin says it lets you self-host, which considerably alleviates "fuck the cloud" concerns. (See <http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717> )

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> All of this JavaScript would be great to discuss at <http://www.jsconf2009.com> Mozilla Labs is releasing some amazing things these days with Ubiquity and Bespin. There is also a lot of there big JavaScript things going on in mobile (PhoneGap), server (ServerJS Group), and Desktop (Appcelerator). Come to JSConf and learn about all of them!

</comment><comment><USER12> This is precisely what I applied to YC with a year and a half ago. It's really great to see that people are working on it!

<comment><USER13> How did you intend to monetize this idea?

<comment><USER12> From the application:

 _We will sell plans that offer version control hosting, testing environments, and easy web hosting tied into the IDE._

Similar to what github is doing, now that I think of it, but with more integration into the online IDE.

<comment><USER14> Seems like a language-agnostic heroku. Hmm, gotta wonder which would have been the most appealing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this is a great move..this should be integrated with VCS and CI system to have a fully blown rapid on the move development platform

</comment><comment><USER16> This looks like it would make a nice front-end for CouchDB shareable apps. <http://jchris.mfdz.com/posts/129>

</comment><comment><USER17> Overall it is a very exciting beginning. Right now there's nothing in it which would convince me to switch. I have a laptop with my web development tools in it, so I can work wherever I am already.

However as the tool progresses and they add features, the web enables further work and functionality, such as a snippet library or other fun tools, this could be a major tool for developers and open source.

<comment><USER18> It's already cool to me as a potential non-worthless editor in a CMS for quick fixes (sometimes I have to write complex JS that lives in a CMS, and I inevitably end up with a copy-paste-save-refresh cycle that gets tedious once I need emacs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was just wondering the other night what it would take to come up with a js/canvas-based windowing toolkit. This looks pretty sweet.

</comment><comment><USER20> Firefox 3 on Ubuntu: really slow and with a bug - can't scroll down when reached a particular line, scrolling seems to be broken.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is Steve Yegge participating on this?

<comment><USER22> No. This is by a team in Mozilla Labs - including Ben and Dion (founders of Ajaxian.com), Kevin Dangoor (creator of TurboGears), and Joe Walker (creator of DWR).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Click on "Edit Now" on <https://bespin.mozilla.com/> and it does nothing (presume the "coming soon" is meant to mean this button is disabled?).

<comment><USER24> if you register you can try it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A bit off topic, but what I'd really like is a "rich"-text editor, like TinyMCE that has language syntax features, that can be incorporated into web apps.

</comment><comment><USER21> Canvas:Text is only available on Firefox 3.1, AFAIK.

<comment><USER26> It works in the latest WebKit nightly as well:

<http://nightly.webkit.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Where is the Demo?

<comment><USER28> <http://bespin.mozilla.com/>

Register and go to the dashboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> i prefer something like itsAllText, which lets me fire up my own local editor for any textarea (using it now with emacsclient). employing a local editing tool lets me keep all my keyboard shortcuts, which is why i use one editor instead of another.

what i would really like to see is direct embedding of your choice of local editor directly into the textarea. there's no way to satisfy everyone with one editor.

but still, bespin is very cool and an improvement over plain old textareas

<comment><USER5> _what i would really like to see is direct embedding of your choice of local editor directly into the textarea._

Back in the day I was hoping that OpenDoc would provide this, but it was not to be. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some vi and emacs clones evolve out of Bespin and then some Greasemonkey scripting could use them to replace textareas.

<comment><USER30> vi clone in JavaScript: <http://gpl.internetconnection.net/vi/>

It could probably be bookmarkletized (or UserScriptified) fairly easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The text editor is impressive in its own right, but what really gets me excited is the possibility of window toolkits to start popping up. Nice responsive UI deployed though the browser - I can picture the future possibilities already :)

<comment><USER32> Definitely exciting, though it will be interesting to see whether or not going entirely canvas pays off. We've thought about it and thus far rejected it in our framework.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which tool do you use to monitor your system and application? - <AUTHOR> Hello<p>I used famous ELK stack to monitor syslog and trigger alarms. I would like to know about alternative tools maybe language specific or maybe not. <comment><USER2> I'd be silly not to mention what I use at Checkly for production monitoring and simultaneously harass you guys with a covert product pitch:

\- Infra metrics & graphing (AWS, Heroku and custom metrics) on AppOptics (formerly Librato)

\- Some metrics on Prometheus

\- Logs on Papertrail

\- Some AWS native Cloudwatch alerts

\- Sentry for backend error tracking

\- Cronhub for a single background job

\- API monitoring with our own product

\- Synthetic monitoring using Puppeteer scripts with our own product.

I love Datadog in general but it's too expensive at this stage.

Full disclaimer: founder at monitoring SaaS [https://checklyhq.com](https://checklyhq.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> Solo SaaS app dev here. I found Sentry[1] to be the most valuable tool for monitoring what's going on inside my (Django/React) app. Sentry catches every exception/error in front- and backend, then collects and aggregates them, so I get a single ticket/notification for every type of issue, instead of thousands of those for every instance of the same problem.

For me, that's much simpler than trying to log each error and analyze the log later on. I still create application logs, but only read them if I need more information about a problem logged by Sentry (most of the time I don't need that at all, because Sentry collects a lot of context already).

Another plus for Sentry is that it can be self-hosted, which makes GDPR compliance a little bit easier.

Besides that, I use Monitor Scout[2] for checking that my app is still up, and fail2ban[3] to get rid of script kiddies trying to brute-force passwords and stuff.

[1] [https://sentry.io/](https://sentry.io/) [2] [https://www.monitorscout.com](https://www.monitorscout.com) [3] [https://www.fail2ban.org/](https://www.fail2ban.org/)

</comment><comment><USER4> At Xero, we use Sumo Logic for logging and New Relic for monitoring, infrastructure tracking and a whole bunch of other things.

We were in a Sumo case study[1] and we've given talks in partnership with New Relic[2] so you can probably find out more if you're interested

[1] [https://www.sumologic.com/case- study/xero/](https://www.sumologic.com/case-study/xero/) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPIpqx47CCY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPIpqx47CCY)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a fairly crowded space. Two of the newer monitoring stacks are Prometheus + Grafana and InfluxDB's Tick stack, both of which are metric based monitoring system and tend to be used with containers. Older open source systems include sensu and nagios, which are check-based systems. Sentry and rollbar are examples of exception/error based monitoring systems. There are a number of commercial solutions available that fall into one of these categories

</comment><comment><USER6> Big fan of Datadog logs[1] in tandem with alerts[2]. You can push metrics/logs from cloud provider native resources, containers, or application level via sdk's.

Of course it is fully managed and paid and at huge scale is probably cost prohibitive.

      [1] https://docs.datadoghq.com/logs/
      [2] https://www.datadoghq.com/alerts/

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's a fairly comprehensive list: [https://landscape.cncf.io/category=monitoring&format=card- mo...](https://landscape.cncf.io/category=monitoring&format=card- mode&grouping=category)

</comment><comment><USER8> We do a lot with splunk and graphite/grafana. More and more, we are incorporating sysdig and lightstep. We integrate these systems with pagerduty.

</comment><comment><USER9> We use ELK for logging and Prometheus/Alertmanager/Grafana for monitoring/alerting/dashboards.

</comment><comment><USER10> We use sensu and elk</comment>


Show HN: Disaster preparedness kit - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tocguide/toc-go-bag

<comment><USER2> That's a good idea! Good luck with it.

I have a kit that I made myself, the problem is keeping it current. Some of the items have a shelf life of only a few years. Do you have any plans for updating the kit after X years?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah, as it says in the kickstarter, we're going to send update emails at the appropriate times, with links to directly order replacements from us or other vendors.

<comment><USER2> I guess I missed that part ;)

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It is missing a flask to hold the emergency whisky.</comment>